Contrition
by geraldine de vaux
Summary: Standalone written sometime around season 2--hence a slightly optimistic ending. A character piece about Lex.


Standalone written sometime around season 2. Character piece about Lex.

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Contrition

Lex occasionally wondered if he were crazy. In honesty, it was more than occasionally and more like worry than wonder, but Lex wasn't really interested in being honest to anyone about this, especially himself.

The spectre of sanity haunted him in the unusual moments when he turned suddenly and for no reason to look behind him, only to see nothing there. It frustrated him to be so helpless against both the question and the answer. He had read, of course, enough works of psychology to know intimately the flaws of self-diagnosis. He had yet to meet a psychologist he considered intelligent enough to tackle the twisted inner workings of his mind. Lex was well aware that he was a genius--and particularly gifted for even that small segment of the human population; he felt his own intelligence like a wall separating him from the rest of humanity--or perhaps it was his upbringing, he wasn't sure. But he had felt that fascinating distance both stretch and shrink since coming to Smallville.

His elevated white blood-cell count had worried his father's doctors, but Lex's didn't need a flashlight (or a blacklight) to see the writing on the wall. More than just his hair had been altered in the meteor shower. He estimated that he healed at least twice as fast as your average joe (although he hadn't had the chance or the inclination to test that figure properly). He had known before that he never got sick, facetiously chalking it up to the unwillingness of germs to tackle a Luthor immune system, but it hadn't seemed all that special to him. He was mostly just greatful that he never had to worry about getting mono or the flu or any of the more--specialized--diseases that he had no doubt been exposed to during his profligate youth. He had never believed in his own mortality while flying on his designer concoctions in the dark pulsing places that he lived for, but he wasn't particularly unique in that respect. But now he began to suspect even the most simple aberrations. And given the constant homicidal tendencies that marked all the other Smallville mutants (except Clark, and Lex _was_ going to find out why, someday), it really was quite reasonable for him to worry about his of state of mind.

Unfortunately for said state, the question of his own sanity--the doubt of it--pre-existed the empirical evidence. He remembered being visited in the hospital by the daughter of one of his father's business associates. It was good business to suck up to the only son and heir of a man who could, at whim, squash you like a cockroach under the heel of his Italian leather shoes. Or, it would have been good, except that the daughter in question had been a haughty little shit who, after laying her limpid eyes on Lex's newly bare pate, had immediately aired her revulsion. If word of that had gotten back to Lionel (and it would have, eventually) it would have been enough to seal her father's sorry fate. The Luthor heir might be unsatisfactory in every way, but the only person equipped to judge that was Lionel himself. But the girl was even stupider and more vicious than her father and had decided to taunt the fat, sick, bald boy with her own beautifully long blonde hair. Her mistake was overcoming her disgust and coming near the bed: Lex simply reached out and (with a strength unexpected from an unathletic, hospitalized nine-year-old) ripped a bloody chunk of yellow from her head. Lex remembered wondering if that's what his own hair had looked like when it had come out of his head, as the girl screamed on the floor beside him. He had run his hand carefully over his head for the first time and decided that it must have happened some other way, since the lack of scar tissue told him that he had not bled so. The girl's father has gotten a fat severance package in exchange for that handful of hair, after Lionel had razed his company down around his ears, and Lex had gotten his first "You're a Luthor" lecture since before the meteors fell.

Lex though there was a chance that he might be a sociopath. He couldn't decide if it might be caused by the meteors, or his father, or simply be a malfunctioning gene. Or all three. Because he really didn't see any way that he could be quite sane. Was it sane to be at war with one's father, hate him, and still seek his approval at every turn? Was it sane to obsess over your best--your only--friend and his secrets to the extent of destroying the friendship? Was it sane to stop and consider whether you should save your father's life, but not hesitate in a second to kill to save the father of another? Was it sane to regret the first choice, but not the second?

Lex truly didn't regret killing Nixon. The man had been a pox, an insect with more ambition than brains. It was in everyone's best interest that Nixon was gone. He didn't even regret not securing Nixon's information before the man died. Well, not much. It would be better, after all, to hear it from Clark when the time came. But even though his reasoning was perfectly sound, Lex thought there still might be a problem that he had not anticipated. Nixon had to die and Lex knew it. But he didn't know if is was right to be so dead about it, inside. He had expected more of an emotional ramification to his actions. A bad dream or two, at least. Most people, Lex thought, would feel some sort of guilt or shame or anger to something if they had been behind the trigger. But Lex, as had been demonstrated to him quite amply, was not most people and all he had where he thought maybe his conscience should be was a shiny blankness, like sun off an unbroken field of ice.

Maybe this was how supergenius mutants were supposed to feel when they killed someone. Maybe he was in shock now and the emotions came later. Lex didn't know, never having killed anyone before. He wasn't too eager to do it again to compare results, either, and there was no one to ask. No one, he thought, who could even begin to understand.

Except Clark.

Clark understood a lot of things about Lex, things he had no business understanding. That was one of the things Lex liked about him. But he couldn't ask Clark. Clark's dead were accidental: broken necks from landing too hard against walls and other hard objects, and that one guy who got crushed under a car. Clark wouldn't yet reveal his special strengths, so Lex doubted he'd be willing to chat about the moral-ethical quandaries of necessary murder.

Clark was, however, still Lex's secret hope. Even though he couldn't quite pinpoint the underpinnings of his own psychology, he was very sure at least that Clark was sane. Clark, with his loving parents and his true friends (so alien), had to be sane or no one in the world was. This was one of the essential truths of Lex's universe. Clark was a mutant and Clark was different, like Lex. Lex could practically feel their sameness ringing together when he got near Clark, like some hard and distant god was bringing together two halves of a divine tuning fork. One person on earth was like him and that was more than Lex had ever dared wish for and it was...not enough to exorcise the apparition of a question that sometimes ghosted behind Lex's eyes, but enough to muzzle it for a while. Enough to let Lex sleep at night, dark and dreamless, with Roger Nixon's blood on his hands, to know that Clark's hands were bloody too.

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End file.
